Grrrl love and Revolution:
Riot Grrrl NYC
Assistant Editor
Directed by Abby Moser
- New Fest New York LGBT Film Festival
- Los Angeles Underground Film Festival, Honorable Mention
- Looking at Music 3.0 Exhibition, Museum of Modern Art
"Like she-devils out of Rush Limbaugh's worst nightmare, a battery of young women with guitars, drums and a generous dose of rage stampeded into popular consciousness early this [1993] year. They do things like scrawl SLUT and RAPE across their torsos before gigs, produce fanzines with names like Girl Germs and hate the media's guts. They're called Riot Grrrls and they've come for your daughters." [Rolling Stone, 1993]
Throughout 1992 and 1993, sensationalized accounts of the Riot Grrrl phenomenon, like the above passage from Rolling Stone magazine, appeared in publications all over the country, describing a new youth subculture that had emerged out of the American underground punk movement. But the media attention was disproportionate to the size of the movement. Despite the intense media interest in Riot Grrrl, very little video documentation of this important facet of feminist and pop culture history exists. This is due in part to a decision by Riot Grrrls to no longer engage with the mainstream media in response to stories that trivialized the movement while appropriating the term “riot grrrl” to sell everything from perfume to t-shirts to the Spice Girls. It was also due to a desire by Riot Grrrls to make their own media and culture.